By Todd Allen
If you’re under 35 or so, you might not remember when Comico was a major player in the comics scene. Back in the mid-80s, they debuted Grendel, Mage and The Elementals (Bill Willingham’s original superhero saga, effectively lost to modern readers due to some ownership problems… yes, Willingham was also the artist on that). It was all going pretty well until they tried their hand at newsstand distribution and the company ended up changing hands by 1990.
Two of the founders of Comico, Gerry Giovinco and Bill Cucinotta, regrouped not quite three years ago to put some comics on the web over at CO2 Comics. They’ve got a number of strips online and it looks like they’re going to be expanding into print.
Giovinco has a lengthy blog post titled “Corporate Comics, the Exodus…Again” on the subject of creator owned comics and the evolution of the direct marketing in that direction. Towards the end of that post, he announces:
This Fourth of July weekend we will celebrate our third year in our new publishing incarnation as CO2 Comics. We will be rejoicing our continued freedoms as Independent Publishers, armed with technology that did not exist thirty years ago, experience, and a continued love for comics. Our Declaration of Independence will be the announcement of three new print publications that will be immediately available to our readers.
Which is followed by a graphic:
If those are the actual covers being obscured, looking at the list of webcomics on the site, I’d guess the one on the left is Heaven and the Dead City by Raine Szramski, the one in the middle is Captain Obese by Don Lomax, and I’m not seeing a striking similarity between the cover on the far right and anything on their existing comics page.
Add one more publisher in the creator-owned print category.
Sad to hear that newsstand was the undoing of Comico. That is how I discovered Grendel in a small town with no comic shop. News of their return to print (coupled with First Comics return) is exciting to say the least. Consider me “on board”!
Carbon Dioxide Comics? Hmm. Methinks they should come up with a new name.
Comico’s JUSTICE MACHINE series is still one of my faves to this day…
Snikt, Mark Ellis is actually working towards a return of the Justice Machine.
No apologies for the name CO2 Comics, Rob, but if you want a better understanding as to why we felt it was the perfect name for our venture you can look here:
http://www.co2comics.com/pages/co2_about.html
CAPTAIN OBESE doesn’t have any complaints about the name.
I reckon that third book might just be Menage a Bughouse — a nice big Bughouse collection by me!
Hard to believe ELEMENTALS is so tangled that it cannot be untangled.
That has to be about the last great property left on the table.